Maps are invaluable for studying everything from the impact of Indians to the derivation of placenames, from imperial encounters to local creations. Xamayca’s transformation into Jamaica is just one of many onomastic remakings common in the Greater Caribbean. In St. Croix, the islanders invented a Danish acre (about 40,000 square feet, smaller than the English version), unheard of in Denmark. It arose as a cultural compromise between Danish administrative practices, particularly the uniform rectangular plantation lots into which the island was laid out in the 1730s and 1740s and the customs of the predominantly English population. This measurement was a local creation, a creolization, even if it was a response to Enlightenment rationalism. Other creolizations are revealed in place-names, as in Willybob, Cunny Hole, and Two-Feet Bay in Barbuda, and the island’s prominence of livestock names (Bull Hole, Goat Island, Hog Cliffs), reflecting the predominant form of economic activity. Creative use of maps has much to tell us about the Caribbean environment.
How cartographers of different empires represented the same place is fertile territory for comparison and contrast. Why, for example, in 1748 did G.L. Rouge refrain from assigning all but the most minimal placenames on his map of Barbados? Most English maps for the same island depicted an extremely densely-populated place. Was the Frenchman trying to make a statement about its significance—or rather, lack thereof?
What is to be made of cartographic ornaments, the semiotic devices that adorn many maps? They tend to mix patriotic symbols, coats of arms, declarations of sovereignty, and assertions of military and maritime supremacy with images of trees, animals, houses, and mountains, pointing to the distinctive environmental and settlement histories of the various islands and related mainland territories. Similarly, the title pages of atlases might be explored. Thomas Jefferys’s West-India Atlas (1775) is notable for the two ships in the bay, both being served by canoes; a group of slaves, one smoking, one leaning on a barrel, and a third, a bare-breasted slave woman holds her child. Flamingos, a turtle, a pineapple, and palm trees signify the place.
Maps of the early modern period often exaggerated not only the number but the size of islands, which generally were enlarged out of all proportion to continental land masses. This characteristic suggests that attention turn to the symbolic, as well as the physical, nature of Caribbean islands. The physical reality of islands afforded strategic advantages, by reducing the costs of defense and transportation and offering high ratios of coastline to land area, thereby enabling direct or cheap access to ocean-going ships. Islands presented fewer risks to colonists than did continents, at least initially. An insular environment was also knowable; it could be mentally circumscribed. Islands also captured the early modern imagination—Columbus’s mental map was full of islands—conjuring up associations with the mysterious, the marvelous, and the magical. The Caribbean environment was fundamentally fragmented, vulnerable, insular, the preferred locations for plantation economies for hundreds of years. The Caribbean environment was also the locus of utopian speculation, the backdrop for drama and literature, and later a laboratory setting for scientific exploration and anthropological speculation.